Britain at War: Sleeping in an Underground station

When the Second World War started on 3 September 1939 I was almost 2 years
old, my father had been killed in an accident just before my birth so you
can imagine the additional stress and concern that would have caused my
mother, a widow with three sons.

6:03PM BST 22 Oct 2008

Very early on in the war we were evacuated to Felixstowe, in Essex. I have no knowledge as to where but it was probably part of a general evacuation of mothers and children from the East End of London. I am told, by a cousin who was evacuated with us, that we were above a furniture shop and that the family where we stayed had a St Bernard dog that would escort us three young boys down to the beach most days, and bring us back for tea with me riding on its back on a sort of saddle.

After some months we returned to London. I think that the situation had changed quite dramatically, there was an invasion threat for the East Coast and as my paternal grandfather had died I think that financial support from him had probably ceased. It is quite likely that contact was lost with his family at that time. Grandmother Wallis (Maud Soffe) had died in 1936, and grandfather had remarried quite quickly thereafter (in fact, he remarried on the day my father died) and had a daughter Alexandra in 1938 or 1939. His new wife was of a similar age to Mum, probably just a few years older. Of my father's siblings Charles was in the Army in India. Ron was in the Navy. Joan & Doris were 16 and 18 (or thereabouts) and Peter would have been ten or so. In all fairness I don’t think that there was anyone to keep in touch with us, and with the war there must have been more pressing things on people’s minds.

We moved back in with Auntie Carrie and her family at 38 Sibley Grove, London-E12. Auntie Carrie, Uncle Wal and their three children, Elsie, June and Brian. In those days I suppose you were expected to live with your family if there was room. Certainly the alternatives were far less palatable.

I remember that their garden backed onto the railway line where Uncle Wal worked as a train driver, a hundred yards or so from East Ham station He had built a small platform where we could stand and watch the trains. It also gave him a short-cut to work. The garden possessed one of the Andersen shelters which were first made available in 1939. Near neighbours of theirs in Sibley Grove were the Weedon family and their son Bert, later to achieve international fame as a guitarist, used to push me in my pram.

When the blitz on London first started in 1941 we, along with many thousands more, would make our way to an underground station (I believe that it was Finsbury Park station) and there, I am told that, once all the trains had stopped running, hammocks would be slung across the lines and we children would sleep for the night whilst all hell was going on above. I have heard that Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 1941 were spent in Finsbury Park station.

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My maternal Grandparents, Martha Rebecca Claisse, and her husband Walter James Claisse lived at 13, St Stephen's Road, Bow, E3 which was not very far from Aunt Carrie. I am told that, once, whilst staying there we had to go into her shelter in the garden because of an air raid. At one stage you could hear the bombs marching along to meet us, there was a brief pause, which lasted a lifetime, an almighty bang, then the bombs were marching away from us. In the morning most of the road was gone, it was believed that two bombs had touched in mid-air. We, and the house, had had a lucky escape.

During the war the rest of my mother’s siblings lived in and around the East End of London. In later years they moved out into the new towns around London.

A few months after returning to London we were evacuated for a final time, this time to Baldock in Hertfordshire. A large number of children and their mothers from London came to Baldock and were farmed out by the local officials from the District Council into houses where there was alleged to be space. A train load of displaced humanity followed a couple of lorries, on which were beds and mattresses.

(I was told that our train was later 'shot-up' by a German raider between Ashwell and Royston ).

We were billeted with a family called Wainwright at 21 West Avenue. I believe that the father was still at home and that there were two children, both younger than us. We were allowed in the kitchen and the room we all slept in. Once we were in bed Mum was allowed to join the Wainwrights in their lounge. I don't think that this was a very happy time for any of us, especially Mum. Although evacuation was voluntary, we had little choice as to where we went. Mum told me once that we could have gone to the Rhonnda Valley in Wales, but she preferred to be in England. I don't think that the people we were billeted on were able to pick and choose. Some of the families from London were quite awful and had come from slum dwellings and had never lived in proper houses with bathrooms and toilets. We were lucky.

As there was a shortage of men, women, including Mum, were drafted to war work. Mum worked at the Kryn & Laye, in Letchworth, about two miles from Baldock, where they made bomb and shell casings. Mum's job was to paint the bomb ends as a colour coding for the type, weight etc. It was there that she met her second husband, Stanley Roy Birkbeck, who was born in Craighead, Co Durham on 6 January 1906. They married in 1943. I believe that I played the perpetual gooseberry during their courting. With the marriage we could get away from West Avenue, and having to eat runner beans and rhubarb and greens.

The house we moved to, 9 Pembroke Rd, had not been lived in for some time, and the garden was overgrown, so high I couldn't see the house from the end. At No 11 lived Mr & Mrs Cox, a lovely kind couple who had two evacuees staying with them, the Denny's, John and his sister. Mr (Bert) Cox was a painter, employed by Simpson’s Brewery in Baldock. The Dennys were both older than me; I think they were of Bob's age. On the other side lived two old ladies, sisters (Miss Foster and Mrs Harvey), Mr Harvey died not long after we came to Pembroke Road. Next to them lived a remarkable old lady, Mrs Carrington (who lived to see Lynette and died a year or two later aged about 106.) At the time of her death, she was the oldest woman in England. I can dimly remember her husband, but he died either during or shortly after the war. I know that he gave Brian a lot of his old fishing tackle.

In 1943/44 I can recall seeing dog fights in the sky and parachutes from stricken aircraft. Once we were taken up into the attic and, looking south, could see the red glow of London burning. All around Baldock there were gun emplacements, block houses etc. in case of an invasion. At the Maltings site, on the Royston Road, there was an internment camp, mainly for Italian prisoners of war. They used to work on local farms. On the Recreation ground there was an arms dump used by the Home Guard. On one occasion an evacuee from London broke in to the dump, stole some guns and held off the Home Guard for a couple of days.

From time to time we would visit London to see Mum's family, mainly Grandma and Granddad Claisse, sometimes Aunty Bec, Carrie or Ginny, the latter always made us nice fudge. The journey in by train was always an adventure as we would pass acres of bombsites on the run in to Kings Cross station. Once we were held for sometime in the Gasworks Tunnel whilst an air raid was in progress. When a bombsite had been in existence for a summer or so Buddleias and Rosebay Willow Herb would grow from the ruins, often 30 or 40 feet above ground level. At that time all the trains were driven by steam so there was a rush to close the windows when you approached a tunnel, otherwise you resembled Al Jolson when you came out the other side. Another time care was needed was near to Welwyn where the train might pick up water from a trough between the rails. The engine driver would let down a scoop as the train passed over the trough and water would go everywhere, especially through the open windows. Trains were also targets for lone German raiders and a number were shot up. They generally went for the goods trains.

Baldock had quite a few near misses from bombs, VIs V2s and the like. Overshoots from London, bombers jettisoning their loads, or, more likely, near misses on the Radio station. This was a key relay station for Rugby and was about three miles north of Baldock.

I can remember most of the road side verges being ploughed and sown with wheat or barley. I think that every square inch of land was vital. We kept chickens and rabbits, to provide fresh eggs and meat. One of our chores was to go out with a sack and return with it full of dandelions and other suitable rabbit food. We had one big buck rabbit, Joey, who sired most of our future rabbits. We also had a favourite chicken, Rookie, only one day Dad killed her, I can't remember anyone other than Dad actually eating meat that night. My sisters, Sylvia and Margaret still remember and speak of Rookie.

Dad had an allotment up on the Wallington road. I think it supplied us with essential vegetables.

Fish and chips were never rationed and at one time there were at least three fish & chip shops in Baldock, plus Cliff Taylor's mobile chippie.

Towards the end of the war and for a few years thereafter the annual activities included 'spud bashing' or harvesting potatoes, picking peas and sprouts (a cold thankless job, it took me ages to get over my dislike of sprouts) and, in the Summer, gleaning corn for the chickens.

As mentioned earlier, fish and chips weren't rationed, but most things were. Clothing, furniture and especially food. Everyone had a ration book and the little coupons were cut out whenever you purchased something. Meat, when available, tended to be scrag end of something or corned beef. You weren't popular if you came home with the end slices of corned beef. Many of the staple foodstuffs, like sugar, flour and tea would be measured out of large sacks or bins into brown or blue paper bags which the grocer would fold and make in front of you.

I can remember VE night in May 1945. Victory in Europe. What a celebration, what excitement. In the Market Place there was an enormous bonfire. The next day there was a pit at least a foot deep where the heat had melted and burned the tarmac. There was a torch light procession around the town and I can remember being carried on the shoulders of one of Mr Cox's firemen colleagues. Some years later, when Mrs Cox died, Kevin was left Mr Cox's brass ceremonial fire helmet.

There was not the same level of excitement in August that year, VJ day, Victory in Japan. It was surprising as I believe that part of our local regiment, The Beds and Herts., had been stationed in the Far East at the outbreak of the war and many local men had been incarcerated by the Japanese after the Fall of Singapore.

I can remember America troops being moved south towards the Channel ports (presumably prior to D Day). We children mobbed them with cries of ‘Any gum, chum?’ They generally obliged us as we didn’t get very many sweets and chewing gum or chocolate were unheard of.

One of the Saturday morning chores was to take the old pram down to the gasworks and collect a hundredweight of coke. It was some chore and we dreaded losing a wheel as then all the coke would go in the road and we would have to pick it all up. The gasworks was also where you would buy tar, used for weatherproofing fences, chicken sheds and rabbit hutches etc. The gasworks man would draw this up from a hole in the ground in a bucket. We were always in fear and dread of falling down the hole and drowning in a sea of boiling tar.

We would often go up to the Weston Hills, about a mile from home, in the winter to toboggan, in the summer to search out leaf mould for the garden, and to explore. Looking for spies as often as not. It was said that a spy had been caught up there in the early part of the war. If true I suppose he was shot.

I have taken the above from my autobiography that I am writing for my granddaughters.